wednesday :: november 27, 2002

> experimental tele-immersion

Drawing on a bank of cameras that constantly scans participants and their surroundings,
tele-immersion allows participants in different states to feel as if they’re chatting in
the same room. But gathering such comprehensive, real-time measurements of a person and his environment
takes a toll: Tele-immersion generates huge amounts of data, requiring massive computing power
and bandwidth.

While the tele-immersion system gathered and displayed information in side- by-side booths at
the Baltimore Convention Center, actual data processing occured some 250 miles away at the Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center. The boost in computing power achieved with the move to the Pittsburgh
Supercomputing Center will permit at least one significant advance in tele- immersion’s
capabilities: For the first time, the system will be able to image an entire room in real time.
Previously, limited processing power restricted the gathering of images to a small area where
participants were seated, while the background was static, not unlike a television anchor seated
before an unchanging image of a city skyline.

"The reassigning of tele-immersion data processing to a faraway supercomputing center is
a milestone for grid computing, which uses remote machines to process data,” Kostas Daniilidis
said. "If connections are fast enough – as with Internet2 – the network itself
becomes a giant computer, linking processors scattered over many hundreds of miles. This tele-
immersion experiment shows definitively that a network computer configured this way can handle
extremely data-intensive operations much more quickly than if processing were occurring within
the confines of a single room."

All this computing is for a good cause. Daniilidis and his colleagues say tele-immersion may
well revolutionize the way people communicate, allowing people on opposite ends of the country
or world to feel temporarily as if they're in each other’s presence. Key to tele-immersion’s
realistic feel are a hemispherical bank of digital cameras that capture participants from a variety
of angles and tracking gear worn on their heads. Combined with polarized glasses much like those
worn at 3D movies, the setup creates subtly different images in each eye, much as our eyes do
in daily life.